This application is based upon and claims the benefit of priority from the prior Japanese Patent Application No. 2000-181578, filed Jun. 16, 2000, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
The present invention relates to a method of distributing video materials to a user via a computer network such as the Internet and an apparatus for reproducing the video materials.
In Japan, the use of the Internet to supply multimedia-teaching material is now under consideration for elementary and secondary education. However, a huge amount of money and a lot of time are required to prepare and provide abundant multimedia-teaching material that are of a quality good enough to maintain students"" levels of interest. In order to resolve this problem, a method of making use of new digital TV programs and a method of reusing educational programs that have been televised are proposed.
In digital TV broadcasting, program information called an EPG (Electronic Programming Guide) is added to conventional video and sound data. The EPG is roughly divided into two types: One is described by text (HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language) and the other by multimedia (MPEG-7 or XML (eXtensible Markup Language)). The EPG is multiplexed with a broadcast wave and transmitted together with the video and sound data. A digital-broadcast-compatible TV set samples a data section from the EPG, interprets it and displays a screen for navigation. Using the EPG, the viewer is able to know the contents of a program and thus retrieve desired data. In the EPG, however, the viewer can obtain information of the whole program, but not that of individual scenes of the program.
Let us consider a 30-minute science program about the xe2x80x9cweight of air.xe2x80x9d When a child questions whether air has weight, he or she has to watch the program from its introduction. If, however, the child wants to know what experiment is carried out to investigate that air has weight, he or she need not watch the introduction. Since, in the EPG, only the program information such as xe2x80x9cweight of air,xe2x80x9d xe2x80x9csciencexe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9cexperimentxe2x80x9d is added to the whole program, the child cannot watch or study only the section that he or she wants to.
On the other hand, conventional broadcast programs without EPG are provided with no keywords. To reuse these programs, keywords should be added to them.
In order to resolve the above problems, a study to extract keywords by recognizing sound data contained in a program or analyzing a subtitle of the program is being conducted. Adding keywords to a program by hand is also currently being carried out.
Conventional broadcast programs or new digital broadcast programs with keywords that specify not only the whole but also each section of a program are gradually being introduced. Even though such broadcast programs are adopted in an actual study environment, it is difficult to maintain the students"" interest in a topic by use of keywords alone.
Certainly, keywords are useful because a user can easily retrieve desired information. In usual learning, however, it is actually difficult to maintain the students"" attention in a particular topic that is needed to be taught. For example, the following method can be adopted. A certain theme is given to a class, and a plurality of words related to the theme are raised from each group of the class, thereby retrieving information using the words as keys. Children will lose interest in this method sooner or later.
If a child does not have much knowledge about what the child wants to know, he or she does not hit upon any suitable keyword for retrieval.
In the conventional method described above, a video material is retrieved using a keyword. Since children are likely to choose an irrelevant keyword in this method because of their ignorance, it is difficult to effectively use the method for teaching while maintaining students"" levels of interest.
In order to make up for the insufficient knowledge of children, examples of questions that children wish to raise should be prepared such that they can retrieve video material corresponding to those questions. However, this method would require a lot of time and effort.
The present invention has been developed in consideration of the above situation and an object thereof is to provide a method and apparatus for providing not only video material but also questions that allow children to study while maintaining their interest in the video material.
According to one embodiment of the present invention, there is provided a method for distributing electronic question lists and corresponding video materials over a network, the method comprising storing a plurality of electronic question lists to a storage, each of the electronic question lists including a plurality of question sentences which are forecasted in advance, storing a client""s profile to the storage, retrieving, according to the client""s profile, one of the question lists from the storage, transmitting the retrieved one of the question lists to a computer system of the client via the network, under the control of the client""s computer system, prompting the client to select at least one question sentence from the question lists, accepting the question sentence selected by the client from the network, and transmitting a video material being associated with the accepted question sentence to the client""s computer system.